Anna Hosie Team : User Experience and Information Architecture Tags : Usability User Experience
14Jan2013

Checkout design for eCommerce

Anna Hosie Team : User Experience and Information Architecture Tags : Usability User Experience

The research has been done. The results are in. So what are the best UX design practices for the eCommerce checkout process?

Cater for guests

Given the amount of accounts and passwords that a person has to keep track of the majority of customers resent having to create an account for what is sometimes a simple purchase. Therefore both guest checkout and account registration options should be available. Prompting for the latter at the end of checkout process using details previously supplied is an easy way to get a customer signed up. 

No of steps

Although in the design of the checkout process it’s generally considered that the less steps the better, some the highest grossing eCommerce website have more than 6 steps. Therefore the recommendation is don’t spend all your resources trying to reduce the number of steps, but instead spend those resources ensuring the order of the steps and what the customer has to do at each step provides the best user experience.

Form design

Apply the following form design principals to the eCommerce checkout:

  • Use a single column for a form
  • Where possible add descriptions or examples to form fields to avoid confusion where form field labels are not clear enough.
  • Make the minimum amount of customer information mandatory. And if the information seems unnecessary but is required give an explanation why.
  • Address validators are often used to avoid typing mistakes on the customers’ part but more often than not the issue is that a valid address is not found. So, if you are going to use an address validator allow the user to override it. 
  • Interestingly, the majority of websites automatically check the newsletter checkbox while the majority of customers find newsletters the most annoying thing about creating an account. 

Don’t ask twice

Asking for information that has already been requested in a previous step is a cause for customer irritation. Prefill forms where possible. Use the postcode to populate the state. Default shipping address to the same as the billing address. Populate the phone number fields with the first number entered, etc.

Refer to the following article for more information